Festival of Deaths (31 page)

Sister Mary Vincent sniffed. “I am
praying
for Carmencita Boaz,” she said.

Then the elevator doors popped open, and Gregor and John Jackman stepped inside. When the elevator doors closed again, Gregor realized that the elevator walls were hung with the story of Hanukkah in words and pictures. Mattathias of Modin and his five sons were painted in earth tones and beards, the way characters from the Bible were always painted these days—except that Gregor couldn’t remember if this story was in the Bible. Mattathias of Modin was the man who had led the uprising against Antiochus Epiphanes when Antiochus had attempted to prevent the Jews from practicing their religion. It was at the successful conclusion of this uprising that the Jews had been left with oil enough only for one day when they needed much more to keep the light lit in front of the Torah, and God had sent along a miracle to let that one day’s oil burn for eight. Gregor didn’t know if he believed in miracles or not, but as miracles went, this was one of his favorites. He wasn’t surprised to see it on the walls of an elevator in a Catholic hospital, either. He had heard stories about the intolerances of nuns, but he’d never actually met a nun who was religiously intolerant. He was fairly sure he would find a nun up on the fifth floor somewhere, searching diligently for something to replace Itzaak’s yarmulke.

He looked over at John Jackman and asked, “What are you thinking about?”

“Carmencita Boaz,” Jackman replied.

Gregor felt the elevator car bounce to a stop and sighed. “Of course you are,” he said. “Of course you are.”

U
P ON THE FIFTH
floor, everyone was thinking about Carmencita Boaz. Nurses went back and forth, in nun’s habits and traditional uniforms and less traditional but still blindingly white trousers and tops. Doctors popped in and out of the room at the center of the corridor where all the action was. Police officers milled around, looking useless.

“I’m going to have to break some of this up,” John Jackman said. “They can’t just stand around and sightsee. You got something to occupy yourself with for the next ten or fifteen minutes?”

“I’ve got somebody I want to talk to.”

“Good. See you later.”

John Jackman took off, rounding up cops as he went.

Gregor moved closer to the door where everyone was congregating. DeAnna Kroll was there, looking frustrated and giving orders to Prescott Holloway. Gregor wasn’t surprised that she was looking frustrated. She was a woman used to being able to get things done, and now she was being forced to wait without doing anything at all.

“Go out and get Lotte and bring her back here,” she was saying. “And when you get back I want you to come right up and find me because I’m going to have something else for you to do—”

“I can’t go out and get Dr. Goldman,” Prescott was saying patiently. “The police just took the car.”

“Well, she’s got to get out here.”

“Well, she can call a taxi. I can’t get her if I don’t have a car.”

“Excuse me,” Gregor said, moving up between them. “Could you tell me—”

DeAnna Kroll’s fingernails were long and red and clawlike. She waved them in the air in front of Gregor’s face, as if she were trying to dispel a mist, as if she couldn’t quite remember who he was. Then she seemed to come to.

“Oh,” she said. “It’s you. You want to know about Carmencita.”

“Carmencita is coming along very well,” Prescott Holloway said. “At least, that’s what we’ve been hearing.”

“Her cheekbone is cracked, but it isn’t really caved in. That’s what they told us. And if her cheekbone isn’t caved in then—”

“There’s less chance that a bone fragment will get into her bloodstream,” Prescott said.

DeAnna Kroll looked relieved. “I knew it was something like that. I’m sorry, Mr. Demarkian, we’re all in a mess here, nobody knows what’s going on and Lotte is going crazy out there at David’s house, trying to get in and see for herself and
this
idiot—”

“It’s not my fault,” Prescott Holloway said.

“How is Itzaak?” Gregor asked. “Have you seen him around?”

“Itzaak? Oh, Itzaak. He’s around somewhere. He’s—”

“Over there,” Prescott Holloway said solemnly.

Prescott Holloway was pointing not toward the door, but away from it, at the nurse’s station with its counter and its small row of black vinyl-covered chairs for visitors. Itzaak was slumped in one of those chairs, his head in his hands. He was wearing a beautiful yarmulke, pushed far to the back of his head. It was made of raw silk and bordered with embroidery so fine, Gregor could practically see the perfection of every individual stitch. Gregor wondered where the nuns had found it.

“Excuse me,” he said to Prescott Holloway and DeAnna Kroll.

He crossed to the row of chairs and sat down next to Itzaak. Itzaak raised his head and then lowered it again. For the moment, Itzaak was only interested in talking to doctors.

“Mr. Blechmann,” Gregor said gently, “I know you are very upset at this time—”

“Not so upset,” Itzaak said. “Not so upset as I was. She is not dead.”

“No,” Gregor agreed. “She is not dead.”

“The doctor says to me there will always be something different now about her face. I mind for her because she will mind, but I do not mind for myself. She will always be beautiful to me.”

“That’s very wise, Mr. Blechmann,” Gregor said, wondering what he meant by that. Itzaak didn’t challenge him, but Itzaak wasn’t listening to individual words. “I know your mind is with Ms. Boaz for the moment—”

“Miss,” Itzaak said. “She never liked that other thing. Ms. She is from Guatemala. It is a conservative country.”

“Yes. I know. Mr. Blechmann, we do have to talk, you and me. We have to get a few things straightened out. Because if we don’t, Mr. Blechmann, the person who did this to Carmencita is going to go free.”

“Free.” Itzaak Blechmann shook his head. “I don’t care if he goes free. I care only about Carmencita.”

“Fine, Mr. Blechmann, fine. But how about this? I was for many years an agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and later a very high level administrator there. I still have a great many friends in the Bureau, and on Capitol Hill, and—possibly more pertinent to the present discussion—in the Immigration and Naturalization Service. If you will talk to me, and tell me everything you know, I give you my word that I will make a few phone calls about Carmencita. And about you, too, if that happens to be necessary.”

“No,” Itzaak said. “That isn’t necessary.”

“That’s good.”

“Why do you have to ask me questions if you know everything about it already?”

“Because I don’t know everything about it already,” Gregor said, standing up. “I only know the bare outlines. And I don’t know enough to give the police an excuse to put this idiot out of business. There are also something called rules of evidence, and whether we like them or not, we must follow them. There’s a coffee machine down at that end of the hall. The coffee will be terrible, but we could both use some. Shall I get you a cup?”

“Yes,” Itzaak Blechmann said.

“Good. Will you talk to me?”

“Yes,” Itzaak Blechmann said again. “I’ll be right back.”

Gregor meant it, too. He had no intention of letting Itzaak Blechmann get away.

T
O LOTTE GOLDMAN, THE
principal problem with this tail end of the twentieth century was softness. Everyone and everything had melted just a little in the heat of luxury. Instead of men and women with firm identities and ramrod backbones, there were—what? It was hard to put it into words. The people who came to be in her show were often colorful and frequently outrageous, but at the core of them there was nothing in particular. It wasn’t that they were hollow, the way shallow people are supposed to be. Most of them meant well and most of them felt as much as it was possible for them to feel. The problem was, it wasn’t possible for them to feel much. It wasn’t possible for them to know much, either. They were adrift in a sea of indeterminacy. Lotte had never been able to make herself a religious woman—although she had tried from time to time, for David’s sake—but every once in a while, sitting on the platform next to some woman in bright green silk and twenty-two-carat solid-gold hoop earrings, she would want to claim the history of her religion for her own. The woman in the green silk would be going on and on about how terrible her life had been, about what life had been secretly all about behind the pretty facade of her middle-class suburban American home. Her mother had praised her brothers’ good grades and only praised her when she was looking pretty. Her father let her brothers ride their bikes all over town but told her girls were only safe when they stayed in the yard to play. Lotte would sit on the platform with her hands folded in her lap and her teeth clamped down firmly on her lower lip, wanting to say: When I was twelve I lived with my brother in the hills outside Jerusalem, in a hole dug out of the ground to keep us safe from rain and gunfire; when I was fourteen I had one dress to wear to school and every night I had to come home and wash it; when I was sixteen a bomb went off under the bench at a bus stop I had just left to get on the bus, and through the bus windows I saw four people blown into pieces of blood and skin and bone on a city street. Lotte wanted to say these things, but she never did, because she knew what answer she would get.

She wanted to say something similar now to the reporters stationed outside the front doors of St. Elizabeth’s hospital, but if she tried she could just imagine what answer she would be reported to have given. What she did instead was to stand on the front steps and give a little press conference, filled with all the correct expressions of horror and sympathy and all the expected resolutions to urge the police on to greater tenacity of commitment in the doing of their duty. Privately, Lotte thought the police had about as much tenacity in the doing of their duty as anybody could reasonably expect. The people who were not reasonable about it did not spend their working lives wondering if someone was going to shoot them.

What had to be said and done here was a script, written by God only knew who God only knew when, and now as surely engraved in stone as any one of the Ten Commandments. Lotte performed her part in this script well. Because of that, her clothes were not clutched at, never mind ripped or torn, and not one person in the mob screamed directions in her face to get her to look at the camera. She said her piece. She answered a few questions. She explained that she was anxious to get upstairs and check the situation out. Then she knocked for Sister Mary Vincent to let her in and escaped into the silence of the lobby. Sister Mary Vincent had been warned that Lotte was coming. There was no time-wasteful checking of identification.

“Mr. Demarkian said you were to be sent directly up,” Sister Vincent said, locking the door again. The reporters hung back and smiled at her. “It might relieve you to know, everything seems to be all right. The doctors don’t believe there will be brain damage or anything like that. I’m afraid she will need some plastic surgery on her face.”

From what Lotte had heard from DeAnna Kroll, this was something of an understatement. She looked at the cross on the wall behind the reception desk and wondered what it would be like to belong to a religion that encouraged you to go to God with every little thing in your life, that promised that God would answer all your prayers and protect all His children. But she didn’t want that. She didn’t even want the God of the Covenant. She only wanted herself.

She went up in the elevator, got out on the fifth floor, and looked around. It wasn’t as hard to find the north wing as she’d thought it might be. All she had to do was follow the trail of doctors and nurses and police officers. She passed another crucifix and thought of what David had told her once, that his friend Father Ryan had said:
God answers all our prayers, but most of the time He says no.
The next thing she saw was a little menorah on display, just inside the door of a room where an old woman was sitting up in a chair, reading Barbara Tuchman’s
The Zimmerman Telegram.
In all the other rooms Lotte had so far passed, the space on the wall over where this woman’s head was was occupied by a picture of the Virgin Mary on a cloud. In this one, that wall space was blank. Lotte wondered whose decision it had been to take the picture out of there.

She stopped at the nurse’s station. The woman there could be identified as an RN only by the plastic name tag above the breast pocket of her white polyester tunic. Otherwise, she could have been a surgeon or a waitress.

“Excuse me,” Lotte Goldman said. “I am looking for the room of Miss Carmencita Boaz.”

The nurse looked up, blinked and blushed. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, Dr. Goldman. You shouldn’t have been left waiting. Have you been left waiting? You should have been brought up right away.”

“I just got here,” Lotte said. “I would like to see—”

“Never mind,” DeAnna Kroll said, emerging from a knot of people farther down the hall. “Hello, Lotte. I’m glad you’re here. The doctor’s still in with her.”

“Still?”

“They have to make sure the wound is entirely cleaned out before they can bandage it. I’ve had hell’s own time keeping Itzaak out of there. He gets hysterical and the doctors just want him gone.” She looked around. “Now he seems to have disappeared.”

“He was talking to Mr. Demarkian,” the nurse said politely, “but now Mr. Demarkian is over there with that police detective and I don’t see Mr. Blechmann.”

DeAnna sighed. “I’ve got it all arranged with the head nun downstairs that Itzaak can spend the night sitting beside Carmencita’s bed as long as there’s also a police officer in the room—”

“A police officer?”

“Well,” DeAnna said, “they have to take precautions. You and I may know better, but they don’t have any other choice but to suspect—”

“
Itzaak
?”

“Lotte, calm down. It’s only a precaution. Even Mr. Demarkian doesn’t actually think—”

“Let me talk to Mr. Demarkian,” Lotte said.

Mr. Demarkian was away from the clutch of people at Carmencita’s door. He was standing at the end of the hall looking out a window onto Lotte didn’t know what—probably a parking lot, in this part of Philadelphia—and talking to John Jackman. His clothes were rumpled and one of the pockets on his suit jacket was torn. Beyond him, the gray day Lotte had come out of only a few minutes before had turned nasty. Something that looked like sleet was falling in slanting lines from black clouds that looked as heavy as bowling balls. Lotte strode over to the two men and grabbed Gregor Demarkian by the shoulder. Since he was over a foot taller than she was, this was not as dramatic a gesture as she wanted it to be.